Lady Blanche Murphy.
VERONA
It was a matter of debate in our party whether we should stop at Verona. The ayes had it, and twenty-four hours afterward the noes indignantly denied that there had been any opposition, so completely had the dignity and attraction of the place driven away the very recollection of their contumacy. Yet if they had had their way when we left Milan we should have gone straight through to Venice, as the great majority of travellers do. We could not remember that any of our friends had ever told us to go thither or had gone themselves. At the hotel, the Due Torri, there were but two parties besides our own—both, like ours, composed of but two members. We had gone to this inn on Murray's emphatic recommendation. "Very comfortable, excellent in every respect," said that red liar: we found it wretched, and the charges exceeded those at the Hôtel Cavour in Milan, which we had just left—one of the finest houses in Europe. There is only one other in the place, which has the forbidding name of the Tower of London; so, in view of our discomfort and the small public, we agreed that we had come to the wrong house. On the day when we went away, however, we fell in with some old acquaintance, fellow-country folk, at the railway station, who had been at the Torre di Londra, and they too thought they had gone to the wrong house. They said it was almost empty; which confirmed us in the belief that the greater proportion of the people who fill the trains and crowd the hotels within a day's journey in every direction pass by this incomparable city. Yet as we paced the broad marble slabs of its pavement, looking right and left, we asked each other, "Why does not everybody talk and write about Verona, rush to it, rave about it?"
The view from the railway, unlike that of many beautiful Italian cities, is striking enough to make any traveller change his route, jump from the train and forego all his plans. The situation is singularly fine. The town sits in state, backed by the outposts of the Alps, fronting the Apennines and looking over the plains of Lombardy spread out between: the rushing Adige curves deeply inward, forming the city's western boundary, and then, doubling on itself, flows through the heart and south-eastward to the Adriatic. The surrounding hills are seamed and crested with fortifications of every age, beginning with those of the Romans of the Later Empire, followed by those of Theodoric the Goth, of Charlemagne the Frank, of the mediæval Scaligeri, lords of Verona, of the Venetians in the sixteenth century, and of the Austrians of our own day, when Verona was a point of the once famous Quadrilateral. Within the walls are monuments of all these dynasties. The housewives and tradesfolk pass on their daily errands along the streets spanned by two noble arches which date from the days of the emperor Galienus. Almost in the centre of the town is the grand Roman amphitheatre; the petty, prosaic, middle-class life of an Italian provincial town creeps, noisy yet sluggish, to its base; modern houses abut against all that is left of its outer wall, which was thrown down by an earthquake in 1184; small shops are kept in some of the lower cells. On that side it has none of the silent emphasis of its greater contemporary, the Coliseum. We found afterward that we might have approached from another direction across an open space, the Piazza Brà, but I think the contrast and effect would have been less. The surprise is more overwhelming to emerge from the narrow street into the arena, and see the seats which sustained the amusement of fifty thousand people rising tier above tier in perfect preservation, forty-three vast ellipses, to the very top. It is only two-thirds as large as the Coliseum, but when one has clambered to the upper-most row and looks down from a height of sixty or seventy feet upon an area of nearly a quarter of a mile, the mind takes no cognizance of anything but the actual immensity before the eyes. Looking outward, we beheld a splendid panorama: first, the irregular surface of the city, broken by steep roofs, arcaded galleries on the housetops, battlemented towers square or slim, lofty belfries, black conical skyward cypresses; then the blue hills—blue as cobalt, although so near—striped in zigzags with the ruddy bands of the serrate feudal fortifications, marked at intervals by curious three- and five-sided bastions, which the architect Sanmicheli put up for the conquering Venetian republic; farther off more peaceful slopes, on which white villas cluster and bask like pigeons on a gable; more distant still, sublimer peaks of pale azure brushed with snow; on the other side, the olive-dun plain irregularly mapped out by the windings of the two rivers, the Adige and Po, yellow as gravel-walks, sprinkled thick with towns and villages like tufts of daisies, and hedged by the purple Apennines.
It is easy enough to fix the different events and periods of the local history by the monuments they have created or destroyed, but the influence of an Italian city is wholly against a systematic study of chronology: the relics of various ages are thrown together, sandwiched and dovetailed, on every side, and it is the impression, the collective impression, of the entire place which is pleasantest to get, and worth most: the rest can be learned from books. There is a sort of epic chain which runs through the associations of Verona, and binds them together in heroic series by all sorts of strange, unexpected suggestions and hints. After the ancient epic, represented by the fragments from Roman history, itself one long epic, come the vestiges of Theodoric, one of the heroes of the Niebelungen Lied, in which he is known as Dietrich of Bern (otherwise Verona). His palace, adopted and used for centuries as the device of the municipal seal, survived the violent vicissitudes of the city's history, and remained, after repeated alterations and additions which made it a sort of architectural chronicle, until the present century. This magnificent memorial of earlier times, which had been respected in turn by the mad fury of Gian Galeazzo of Milan and the implacable rivalry of Venice, was blown up by the French in 1801: large barracks now stand upon its site, so that the stones of its warlike builder are not subverted to purposes unbefitting his memory. Then follows Charlemagne—putative founder, more probably first restorer, of the cathedral—in his most mythic and heroic aspect, fresh out of the Chanson de Roland, while Roland and Oliver keep guard on each side of the porch, the latter bearing a mace with a ball and chain, the former his famous sword Durindal, the stone counterpart of the weapon preserved for nearly a thousand years in the monastery of Roncesvalles. The great heroic satire of the twelfth century, Reineke Fuchs, is suggested by figures and groups such as are to be found in all old Gothic churches north of the Alps, but seldom south of them—a hog, dressed as a monk, standing on his hind legs and holding a breviary, on the portal of the cathedral, and in the church of San Zenone two cocks marching off with a fox dangling from a pole. All the associations of the place centre in and radiate from Dante and his unearthly poem, so much of which was written here or hereabouts. It is extraordinary how he has appropriated the memories of the place, even down to Romeo and Juliet—who by virtue of their immortalized loves belong as much to our times as to their own—by the single well-known line:
Vieni a veder Montecchi e Capelletti.
There is a colossal statue of him by a modern Veronese sculptor, not unworthy of the subject or place, standing in the quiet Piazza dei Signori amid the deserted homes of the Della Scale, looking toward the palace of Can Grande, whose generous hospitality could not sweeten the bread of charity nor ease the steps of a patron's court to the proud exile. Dante could not have been easy to live with upon any terms. "Eh, puir fellow! he looks like a verra ill-tempered mon," quoth Carlyle once after a long contemplation of the poet's portrait. He played the part of Mentor, and a very morose one, to the splendid, gallant, good-natured prince and his gay court, and Can Grande seems to have derived the same sort of diversion from his diatribes as from the quips and cranks of his jesters. At last Dante wore out his welcome, as he did everywhere until the patient earth gave him an abiding-place at Ravenna. His whole life of disappointed ambition, unrecognized patriotism, unspoken love, baffled hatred, lonely rangings in awful spheres, banishment, poverty, mortification, unrest, inspiration, conscious immortality, passes before one in this spot, which he must have crossed and recrossed innumerable times, and his presence even in the marble makes it all his own. Yet if the statue could wake to life, the man would not know the familiar place, which has been wholly transformed since his days. The principal ornament of the square is the Palazzo del Consiglio, a beautiful example of cinque-cento architecture, its exuberant decoration still subordinate to the harmony and proportion of the general design. This has been converted into a pantheon for the celebrated men of Verona, whose statues surmount the building, and among whom we recognize many old acquaintances—Cornelius Nepos, Catullus, Pliny the Younger and others of later date and less renown.